It is believed at least five two-month-old babies, their siblings and parents were given no notice as they were forced to leave Adelaide’s Inverbrackie detention centre at 3am last week, without access to legal advice.

On Monday, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison refuted this, saying the families were notified “well in advance of the 20 minutes that advocates are suggesting”, but would not say how much notice was given.

The sudden relocations come as Immigration Minister Scott Morrison announced a $2.6 million educational package for school-age children in the island’s detention centre, run by the Catholic Education Office of Western Australia, suggesting the government is planning to increase the number of child detainees on the island.

Jacob Varghese, who is representing 26 Australian-born asylum-seeker babies, said the families were living in fear they would be ”shipped off”’ to Christmas Island.

”There’s a really heavy-handed and unnecessarily cruel approach taken to removing people, which is knocking on their door in the middle of the night and shipping them off,” said Mr Varghese, the principal of Maurice Blackburn lawyers.

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